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***The FEBRUARY 2018 VUD is now available.***

Coahuila: Piedras Negras, Saltillo and Torreón, matching the footprint of the Media FM stations on AM in Coahuila.

Chiapas: Playas de Catazajá, Tapachula and Comitán. Grupo Informativo Fusión Peninsular won stations at all three cities in IFT-4. As this is the first ever radio service in Playas, it's probably them.

Fusión Peninsular, whose name and investors suggest Quintana Roo origins (Chiapas is not on a peninsula), is owned by Javier Alexander González Slim, Jaime Eduardo Martínez González and Juan Leopoldo Ramos Hernández, according to information supplied by the IFT.

González Slim runs the Fundación Yantra, a fairly all-purpose charity. Martínez González is listed as the president of a resort HOA in Cancún. There is no information on the third principal.

Guerrero: No IFT-4 station was won in Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo, but that town is on the affiliate list.

That's right, that's the custom at RSN, where they brought a priest (Saúl Norzagaray) to the station to celebrate Mass this week.

In 2017, RSN had an interesting year, with a notable and heretofore unreported station acquisition, of XHWS in Culiacán (a former Radiorama station in a market known for Radiorama cluster stability). The format remains La Bestia Grupera, with the Javier Alatorre afternoon newscast syndicated by GCIM (a related company to Audiorama), but you can't help but wonder if someday La Mejor will come to the capital of Sinaloa...

-An additional social station was chosen from among two applicants for one allotment at Puerto Vallarta.

Six days later, the IFT resolved an avalanche of applications resulting from old permit filings under the LFRTV.

Many of these were choices from among mutually exclusive applicants, and it's not clear from the agendas what actually happened. The numbers signal how many permit applications were ruled on in each location.

-Zacatecas (5): Among the applicants were Fomento Educativo y Cultural Francisco de Ibarra, A.C., the legal name of the Universidad Autónoma de Durango private university (XHUAD-FM-TDT, XHLUAD and XHTLAN), which appears to have won. Losers were Fundación Tiempo de Comunicar, A.C.; Fundación Cultural por Zacatecas, A.C. (NTR); and Impulso a la Música Mexicana, A.C. There appears to be a fifth party, which won a station.

-Los Mochis (4): Sinaloa, Arte y Gloria, A.C.; Fomento Educativo y Cultural Francisco de Ibarra, A.C.; and Universidad Autónoma de Sinaloa. Sinaloa, Arte y Gloria is a social wolf operating XHGVE-FM "La Interesante de Guasave". The Universidad Autónoma de Sinaloa has never operated a broadcast station outside of Culiacán, where it owns an AM-FM combo.

-Hermosillo (4): Fomento Educativo y Cultural Francisco de Ibarra, A.C.; Democracia y Deliberación Desértica, A.C.; Organiden, A.C.; Secretaría de Cultura. Somehow this logjam came out with all four stations winning. Organiden owns the unbuilt XHGYM-FM in Guaymas. The Secretaría de Cultura station is a long-tied up proposed repeater of Radio Educación, similar to XHYRE in Mérida. As to DDD, there is no information, but it smells like a potential community station.

There was also an indigenous station added to complete the picture. This station will be owned by the Mixteca indigenous community in the municipality of Santa María Yucuhiti, Oaxaca. It appears to be the legalization of station "Eco de la Montaña - Radio Yucuhiti 92.5 FM".

In all, the IFT awarded 14 stations in a single meeting!

-There were also a series of station sales, as XHCV-FM is sold by Rafael Castro Torres to René Castro Echeverría; Radio y Televisión de Colima transfers XHTTT-FM in Colima to Telecomunicaciones CH, S.A. de C.V. (also a unit of CapitalMedia).

If I'm reading the IFT meeting notes correctly, in a week the IFT awarded 27 public, social, social community and social indigenous station concessions. Some of these are applications that have been hanging on for years.

Winner: People who like university radio. It was a good day to be the private Universidad Autónoma de Durango, which has doubled the size of its radio station footprint. The station at Zacatecas is noteworthy as the first ever university radio station on FM in the entire state, while Mochis and Hermosillo are also part of their expansion. (They did apply for Chihuahua Capital, but I can't see more stations being inserted there.)

Winner: People who like university radio in Los Mochis. With the aforementioned UAD expansion and the second ever radio station for the Universidad Autónoma de Sinaloa, the number of university stations either on air, under construction or freshly awarded is now 4, including XHMFS in El Fuerte (Universidad Autónoma Intercultural de Sinaloa).

Winners: Tangancícuaro, Tancítaro, Santa María Yucuhiti, Tuxpan in Jalisco, Bochil, Urique, Bocoyna and Tulum. The awarded stations are the first radio service in each of these localities, with the exception of Tulum, for which this is the first noncommercial station to be set up, and Tangancícuaro, where a permit discontinuity accounts for one of the stations. It is definitely feasible in the two towns in Chihuahua that there have never been reliable FM radio transmissions — Urique in particular is uniquely remote, and the closest FM station is nearly 100 km away at Guachochi (before September, it was 115 km away at El Fuerte, Sinaloa).

It is worth noting that La Voz de la Sierra Tarahumara can't have anything to do with XETAR radio in Guachochi.

Loser: People who like university radio in Cancún. The private Universidad Tecnológica del Sur lost out. It remains to be seen who actually won there, and also at one station at Zacatecas.

Loser: Ambitious, large station count social wolves. Sorry, Fundación Ecoforestal and Impulso a la Música Mexicana, but you did not make it. (Rate Cultural y Educativa now has its third station, with awards having already been made for Guadalupe-Zacatecas and Manzanillo.)

In Mexico City radio, nothing is forever, and now, nothing is Siempre.

Grupo ACIR has restored the name 88.9 Noticias and its longtime slogan Información que Sirve, which were first used between 2003 and 2013, to XHM-FM, which had been known for the past four and a half years as Siempre 88.9.

The revamped 88.9 Noticias still retains a lot of music programming outside of peak hours and actually has no programming changes at all, but the return of the 88.9 Noticias brand was completely unexpected from a company that maintains few news/talk stations as it is, two of them future AM-FM migrants that appear headed for format changes, plus XHM and XHVILL in Villahermosa.

-The Estéreo Peñasquito station at Mazapil, Zacatecas, is indeed being run by the mining companies there. This caused a bit of confusion at the Pleno, not in the least because the station would be entirely in the hands of Goldcorp management. With fewer than 800 people, Mazapil's new station will have one of the least populated service areas in the entire country.

In fact, the Radio La Filosita station is related. Goldcorp owned the mine there and sold it to Leagold, another Canadian mining company.

-Grupo Radio Fiesta Sierreña's station is more like a cluster of four stations. While Moctezuma was known, they had also applied for stations at three other small Sonoran towns: Bacerac, Bacadehuachi, and Divisaderos.

———

Elsewhere...

New broadcast stations mean more employees in the industry, and the STIRTT wants to represent them. The Puebla chapter is looking to represent an additional 100 people this year due to the launch of five new radio stations and the two TV stations from IFT-6. The national organization has begun talks with Multimedios and Telsusa to represent their employees, as well.

And one new IFT-4 radio station owner might have politics on the brain again. The principal of Mezkla FM (San Andrés Tuxtla, Veracruz) is Rafael Fararoni Mortera, who made his money in the beer distribution business (one article I found called him the Beer Czar of the Tuxtlas) and was at one point the mayor of San Andrés Tuxtla. One report has him looking for the PAN-PRD-MC stamp of approval to run for the Chamber of Deputies.

While anonymous edits to Wikipedia always deserve a grain of salt, this one might explain the long game in the unusual station move-in being conducted by Grupo ORO, the new owners of XHEV-FM.

XEEV-AM 1330 had gone on the air in 1982 and for more than 30 years broadcast to the people of Izúcar de Matamoros. In its last Izúcar-focused incarnation, it was Capital Máxima for the area, having become XHEV-FM 99.9.

It caught my attention when XHEV was relaunched by ORO as La Romántica, La Flor de Atlixco. Even just moving the studios the 35 kilometers between Izúcar and Atlixco is an unusual move by Mexican standards. But there might be a second hop, or at least this hop comes with a transmitter move that enables the second at some point.

The anonymous Wikipedia edit put the transmitter at a Cerro Cristo Rey in San Bernardino. Given the area, it's likely the San Bernardino in question is not Tlaxcalancingo, which is to the northwest (and on the IFT books as the home of XHSBE-FM and XEZAR-AM), but rather San Bernardino Chalchihuapan, which is to the northeast. More importantly, from a radio standpoint, it's also halfway between Atlixco and the Puebla metropolitan area.

Cerro Cristo Rey includes a ridge where telecommunications equipment is already located, though no broadcasting uses. There is also an Iglesia Cristo Rey atop the mountain, and it's a popular site for hang-gliding.

The potential benefits of this site are captured by this set of images from atop the mountain.

Here's the gorgeous view to the northeast, showing Chalchihuapan in the foreground but with all the urban development of Puebla in the background.

The ridges on the other side of Chalchihuapan mean that as a Puebla station, XHEV would be a rimshot and may actually miss parts of the metro in the 60 dBu contour. It's also worth noting that the HAAT of the site, even with no stick, is somewhere around 260 meters, so the station could not operate at 6 kW ERP without a change in station class. Additionally, the signal would not be very listenable in Izúcar.

When IFT commissioners can't make their meetings, they'll often leave written explanations of their votes, and Adriana Labardini's explanation for a vote on a Puerto Vallarta station gave us two items.

We first off know who that station is going to: Frecuencias Sociales, A.C., making it their third station. It will not go to the other applicant, Carlos Martínez Macías.

We also know the callsign and frequency: XHPVT-FM 97.5.

In fact, we know other callsigns and frequencies for the same reason, but unfortunately not all of them from the meeting:

Frecuencias Sociales will be operating XHTOJ 91.5 in Tomatlán and XHTUJ 90.1 in Tuxpan, both also in Jalisco.

XHICT-FM 104.7 will be operated by Identidad Cultural en Tulum, which of course is in Tulum, Quintana Roo.

Felipe de Jesús de los Santos Cigarroa gets his initials in a callsign: XHFJSC-FM 102.5, which will broadcast to the people of Tonalá, Chiapas.

Comunicadores de Tancítaro goes on air to that town in Michoacán on XHTNC-FM 105.1.